Exciting Features Shipping with Chrome Beta 76

Chrome Beta 76(76.0.3809.21) is shipping with new features in one of its major release that will have you excited including support for sites that have a dark theme, lazy loading, an identity disk and ability to link to specific parts of a webpage plus other features.

Dark Theme

Some browsers have a dark mode or theme that invert colours of web pages ut this distorts sites. Apple’s Safari browser does it better by using the “prefer-color-scheme” feature that Google is adopting too.

If a website has its own dark mode, Chrome automatically activates it if your device is set to dark mode.

The dark theme gives you three choices:

the default setting keeps Chrome on Light Mode until the Battery Saver is enabled

the second option while on Light mode keeps the black text on white background

Dark mode will have white text on black background

Lazy Loading

Lazy loading is a feature Chrome Beta 76 will come with that reduce load times of site by not downloading some page elements until you scroll down for them to actually come to view.

This feature lets websites avoid loading embedded content such as images or ads until a user scrolls down to view the elements. Google says that deferring the loading of images and below the fold iframes will reduce data and memory usage while speeding up above-the-fold content.

Ability to link to specific sentences/phrase of a web page

Chrome Beta comes with a “Text URL Fragments” flag that will let you link to a certain sentence or phrase. You’ll have to enable the flag and restart the browser. Chrome loads the page then scrolls down to the specific part.

I can’t wait for this feature to be enabled by default and let users create links out of them. If you like sharing snippets of an article you’re reading, they’ll be no need to highlight the text and screenshot it to share on social media.

Identity Disc

#identity-disc is a new feature Chrome Beta will pack that adds your Google account profile feature to the top right corner of a New Tab page. When you tap on it, it will open a ‘Sync and Google Services’ page. The Identity disc is a reference from the movie Tron Legacy.

Web Share functionality

This is an updated version of the Web Share Target API now at level 2 that means web apps(PWA) can receive files and images from native apps. If you have the Twitter PWA on your phone, photos can be shared to it from the Camera app if you don’t have the actual Twitter app installed.

Here are some other features worth noting:

Chrome Beta will make it harder for sites to know when you’re in incognito mode.

When a PWA site is detected, Chrome will show an install button on the address bar.